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Fox News executive who decried ‘Darker, Gayer, Different’ U.S. Olympic team has retired

U.S. bobsledders Lauren Gibbs, left, and Elana Meyers Taylor, right, show off their Olympic silver medals with Ivanka Trump, daughter of the president. (Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters)

Last month, Fox News Executive Vice President and Executive Editor John Moody penned a column on the network’s website decrying the U.S. Olympic Committee’s push to make its teams more diverse, a response to a Washington Post story written by Rick Maese. Moody seemed to denounce the fact that the USOC was striving to attract athletes of all stripes in an attempt to have its teams look more like the American population as a whole and suggested that such diversity would negatively affect the United States’ standing in the medal table.

“Unless it’s changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger.’ It appears the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to ‘Darker, Gayer, Different.’ If your goal is to win medals, that won’t work,” he wrote in a piece headlined “In Olympics, let’s focus on the winner of the race — not the race of the winner.”

The network pulled down Moody’s story after it was published, saying it “does not reflect the views or values of FOX News,” and on Thursday the network told CNN that Moody had retired, a move it said was in the works before the column was published.

A former New York bureau chief for Time magazine, Moody had been an executive at Fox News since its inception in 1996, though CNN reports that his role “was largely ceremonial and that he had little power in recent years.” His Olympic column drew outrage from a number of corners.

“These athletes are at the Olympics because they already won by qualifying to represent the United States on the world’s stage,” GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said, per BuzzFeed, “and they did so despite facing discrimination from places like Fox News throughout their careers.”

Matt Bonesteel spent the first 17 years of his Washington Post career writing and editing. In 2014, Bonesteel pivoted from the newspaper to online and now he blogs for the Early Lead and other Web-based products owned by The Post.

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